


The Woods

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M, Massachusetts, Salem Witch Trials AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-05-03 06:45:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5280722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1692. "How oft have you eat and drunk your own damnation?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Woods

OVERTURE (APRIL 1692)

Before dawn in the fumbled black hours the embers began to go grey and still against the brick. In the grim and dark unpainted wattle-and-daub homes gathered tight and close like animals for warmth often there was no foundation. The winters were so cold the servants could not break the frozen sod to dig even the meanest grave. Late in the winter none of them ate regardless of their richness and often after sunset it seemed there would never be light again.

The land itself was haunted and haunteder the further West you walked or rode or dared to live and most believed the world itself possessed by what leaked out from its very center. What escaped was burned but evil still remained. A flush red stain – spilt wine, or a blush, or blood. After the Indian wars those of them who had survived left the green lush valleys of the Swift and the Connecticut and the bones of their constructions there dissolved into the forest and became themselves ghosts.

The Colony became the Dominion became, in 1691, the Province of Massachusetts Bay. It had been seventy-one vivid and aching lean blue-skinned winters since it had become real. They did not think about the time before. As though this very world had come into being only when they saw it – a gray blur like and unlike the sea distant unto the horizon, and amidst the waves the sound of birds – raw and bleeding but it was perfect because it was God’s.

The Indians believed in every living thing there was a spirit. When they heard they thought it sacrilege and some brave and stupid among them rode into the wilderness to teach the heathen about their own superstition – refined and superior, itself with ritual, and with a master, and with a false master. They saw their own world rife with demons in dreams or waking. At the edge of the pastureland was a blackness that subsumed, a seething static pleasure. It was a temptation rather the opposite of death and it was not so much that it would come to you but it was that you would be drawn inexorably into it and there would be no coming out.

The wilderness had so resisted consummation they began to wonder if perhaps it would turn all their efforts back upon them. They survived horror real and imagined and they wondered why they suffered if they were Godly and so they began to look amongst themselves for traitors.

\-- 

IN THE FOREST

He had found it a creature dying but when the moon set it became a man. The flesh was still knitting back together over the flank. And the sleek gray pelt turned inside out into skin and cured like leather before his eyes – skin pale as dawn, blood tracking still from the minor wounds. Blood redder than anything but blood – no metaphor for blood, Sirius thought, sitting back upon his heels. Nothing that would compare to blood in redness. All other red being imitation, even the sunset – even the leaves in the autumn – was a mockery of blood.

The ribs finely buttressed beneath the skin rose and fell with the breath. Blood drying still upon the belly where Sirius had repaired the great tearing wound with phoenix tears from a vial. The hands curled – the bones like a bird’s – into the earth. Old scars upon scars silvering, and the face, which was a human’s face, soft in sleep, but for the furrowing of pain between the brows. And the closed eyes – the delicate trembling membrane beneath which something moved.

 --

HISTORY

He himself was from Beverly and had been raised there in the saltbox homestead his family had owned since his grandfather had sailed from Cornwall in 1630 and found there was no room left in Plymouth. The Blacks and Lestranges and Notts had acquired the land just West of Salem from the colonial government by petition. He recalled having first done magic at some tender age while he walked in the snow with his nanny and how afterwards that evening they had had cake and his parents and his aunts and uncles had brought up a cask of the Blacks’ finest port from the cellar. In his early youth he played with Muggle girls and boys from down the road until his family drew him away and closed him up inside the house with books they had brought in crates from the old world. When he was eleven he went to study at a secret school in Lynn with a Mr. Dumbledore.

His parents dressed Sirius and his brother in fine wools and had the Mathers over for tea. Increase launched into an invective regarding witchcraft after two glasses of port with all the storming righteousness of his pulpit. About the table spines straightened. Hackles bristled. And the Blacks, who loathed Muggles behind closed doors – some of whom went so far as to plot their extermination – smiled and simpered. It was to their advantage to acquaint themselves with the Mathers, Sirius’s father said later. “Old blood is old blood.”

At school Dumbledore convened special classes he called Defense Against Muggle Prejudice. He taught the students a Flame Freezing Charm and after a month they were made to stand upon a burning pyre and perform it. A few failed out of nerves and the teachers darted forward to douse the flames with jets of water from their wands and heal the wounds upon the students’ feet and legs. Sirius did well, despite the flames tickling so aggressively he had to purse his lips to keep from laughing. The enduring problem was their light, which was blinding and haunted him when he closed his eyes for another day. They were taught a Bubble Head Charm in case they were drowned and late in their seventh year they were walked slowly through the very complicated spell process that could prevent and simulate death by hanging.

With renewed interest he read by candlelight his father’s old spellbooks. He had learned a charm that would alert him should anyone come to the door of the study. He searched them rabidly for Dark ceremonials like the sort his Muggle neighbors had mentioned – the sort that reached Increase Mather’s sermons. The blood rites, the ritual performed upon naked skin. Divining the future and the identities of one’s lovers with a mirror and a crystal ball and the white of an egg. The forfeiting of oneself to the devil bodily, which – at fourteen, with no friends, hating his family, hating Beverly, hating the house, hating hating hating everything but the woods and the dreams he woke from gasping before he could reach some trembling golden thing he didn’t know, and couldn’t see – seemed at the very least more interesting than Dumbledore’s practiced, regimented spellry.

In the books he found no explanation and no instruction. He did, however, find something else that intrigued him – a spell process, rather a long con of it, requiring incantations and potions and magic herbs, that would allow him to shift when desired into the skin of an animal.

 --

THE WOUND (AND THE OTHER)

Beside him through the forest and careful upon the underbrush Sirius floated the limp body back to the cabin. It took him ten minutes to work himself and the wolf back through the wards cast by Dumbledore upon the structure. Inside he laid the wolf out in the bed and saw the wounds remaining after he had healed the great tearing bite were superficial and had begun already to clot. Marks of tooth and claw upon the shoulder and the thigh to match a silvering network of old scars, alike in pattern. When they would not heal with his wand (he suspected he had forgotten the charm) he used the dittany in the brown dropper bottle provided for him by Dumbledore.

He stoked the fire up and made coffee over it. He watched the wolf sleep. He held his wand up his sleeve and close against his wrist and he tried not to turn his back upon either the bed or the door. Through the wards and their swarming insect humming he strained his ears to hear the forest – the eardrumbeat of the April wind stirring in the new green, bright and budding, sheer and delicate in the grey dawn. A softer wind these days – warm from inland – than the rough and bone-chilling sea wind of February, in which the young women of the neighboring village had begun to hear voices. The minister in Beverly had been called to Salem and Sirius and his brother had watched him go East toward the sea across the spreading white field of snow in his dark carriage like a raven bearing blackest news. In Salem folk said the new minister’s girls had been seized with fits. They were pricked with pins by someone they could not see and they contorted their bodies like circus acrobats and they spoke in tongues and screamed. The elder Blacks had the Lestranges and the Malfoys for dinner and laughed about it behind tightly closed doors.

Three women were arrested and more Salem girls claimed torture. One of the Malfoys said he had heard tell Tituba was indeed a real witch who had learned divination and potionmaking in Barbados from great masters, but proof never surfaced. Late in that dark and hungry month those Wizardkind who had not begun to flee to the Western townships or even to the Dutch patroons upon the Hudson met in secret at Dumbledore’s farm outside Lexington. They sat in silence at the table, hungry – Sirius had forgotten the Law of Elemental Transfiguration that meant wizards too suffered with Muggles in the lean years. Dumbledore himself stood before the fire with the light golden upon his robes and beard. “It all appears to be happening,” Dumbledore said, “rather sooner than we had hoped.”

_Imperius_ was the consensus, perhaps wrapped in with a Stinging Hex or a mild _Crucio_. It had been executed discriminately upon the young girls of Salem village and perhaps some outlying regions, based on initial reports. Dumbledore suspected it was the work of a Dark wizard whose name he dared not speak and whose origins in the New World were as yet unknown. Some had chalked up this burgeoning conflict among other recent disasters to an extremist contingent looking to keep America fully magical through full extermination of Muggle colonists as well as the native Indian population. The chaos of a witch-hunt in Salem, Dumbledore theorized, was part and parcel of this sinister plan.

The International Wizengamot had outlawed Muggle-baiting and Muggle torture early in the 1400s, but there was no Wizengamot outpost in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Instead, there was Dumbledore’s hastily gathered band – a ragtag brigade with variations in skill and training, equipped with secondhand wands and basic spellwork skills, rather wishfully dubbed the Order of the Phoenix after Dumbledore’s admittedly majestic but decidedly ruffled bird. Many could not make potions and only three (Sirius among them) could sustain a corporeal Patronus. Most of the renowned families had sent little more to Dumbledore than their youngest sons or least marriageable daughters and a flagon of mulled mead. They understood what was in motion and thought to save their name, and their skins. Some said even the Potters had left Plymouth for the West.

Sirius at this point had been as good as disowned and had come unattached to the meeting as a sort of free agent. Dumbledore pulled him aside after the proceedings and Apparated them together, just after dawn, to a clearing in the forest Northwest of the former settlement at Quinsigamond amidst the dark hills. Sirius’s head ached from drinking and he hardly followed as Dumbledore walked him through the charm process that kept the shack Disillusioned. As he lifted the wards one by one it appeared from thin air – ceiling concave, wattle decaying. “You can only see it,” Dumbledore explained, “if you know where it is.”

Inside amidst the dust and the hanging spiderwebs there was not more than a bed and a washbasin and a smoke-stained fireplace. In one corner, a hutch containing scant grain, seeding potatoes, smoked meat, and sundry medical supplies. “You are to owl me weekly with a report,” Dumbledore instructed. “When you need I will send fresh supplies. These feral folk take a life debt very seriously – to them it is like our Unbreakable Vow. The Dark Lord will have come for them to create alliances and some will be too smart to take it and it is those I would like for you to cultivate.”

“Cultivate?”

“Yes,” said Dumbledore, “You are to get them on our side by any means necessary.”

That had been three weeks ago and in the interim Sirius had waited, sick with fear, for the full moon. He had walked in the forest upon the deer paths, Disillusioning himself even in the day, feeling for magic, catching unfamiliar traces: ragged metallics, cold and bright. Like a run of mineral through stone – like water drawn from a forest well, tannin-rich, red with it. It was magic meant to demarcate and protect territory and much of it was very old, and if it had been created with spells they were not any spells he knew.

Then the moon, and the scrappling from the forest and the barks and the howls, and the wolf in the bed, asleep.

 --

INTERVIEW

Late in the afternoon it stirred. The slats of the bed creaked like a bad stair and the voice from it said – and a cold knife lanced low through Sirius’s gut – “Are you the devil?”

It was rather a normal voice, hoarse and soft, fragile with sleep, ancestral accent still in the unlearning. Its owner had concealed itself nearly entire beneath the wool blankets but for its wild hair and its rich golden eyes. Sirius said, “No.”

“But you were the dog.”

“Yes.”

“So are you death?”

“I’m just a wizard.”

“Just,” the wolf said, perhaps a scoff, tasting it. It sat up, slow like a new colt, joints cracking loud, skin like milk (rich, cream, veined through silver), blood dried in patches like bruises. Beneath it bones sharp with famine architectural and crenellated. Pain furrowed in the brow again for a moment and then it passed. “What happened?”

“You were hurt.”

“I can feel that.”

“I healed you,” Sirius said. “Phoenix tears.”

“Where’s your bird?”

“My employer sends a vial.”

“They still work from a vial?”

“There’s no horrible tearing hole in your gut anymore is there?”

The wolf looked down upon itself and the concave freckled flat of its belly intercut with old scars raised and runic and it said “It doesn’t look like anything happened at all.”

“It was nothing Dark,” said Sirius. “I wouldn’t know anything like that. And I’m not lying. I saw your intestines.”

“I know you’re not lying,” said the wolf. “I remember your dog. And I thought death sent you.”

“Not death.”

“Then who?”

“Albus Dumbledore.”

“The regicide?”

“Yes, well, one of the fifty-nine.”

“Dumbledore the regicide sends you phoenix tears to heal maimed werewolves.”

“It is in his interest to create alliances. At the present moment.”

One dark eyebrow cocked like a shotgun high on the forehead. “Ah.” Gingerly it pulled its knees, wrapped as they were in colorful mothbitten wool, to its chest. “You’re several months too late for most of us.”

“I don’t care for most of you,” said Sirius, realizing only too late how it sounded. He went on lamely: “I mean I care for – for the bravest and smartest of you. Who will stand up to the Dark Lord.”

“Ever like a wizard,” said the wolf.

“I’m sorry if – ”

“You’re not. You won’t get near me with a ten foot stick.” It had set one white eyetooth against its lip. Nearly a smile. “Nevermind your wand’s up your sleeve and I haven’t got one. Nor claws nor fangs, for the next twenty-seven days.” 

Sirius went and sat at the end of the bed. Cold spread upwards, bitter fear – but he felt the warmth of his wand against his wrist, magic sweet and golden in his own blood. “Better?”

“Marginally,” said the wolf. “Can we have a smoke?”

“I don’t – ”

“I can smell it.”

Begrudgingly Sirius took the envelope of tobacco from his pocket followed by the pipe, and he packed it full. “What’s your name.”

“Remus,” said the wolf. “From Hadley. My father was a wizard; Lupin was his family name. Yourself?”

“Sirius Black. Wizarding since time immemorial. From Beverly.”

“I know not – ”

Sirius lit the pipe and took a few rich puffs. “Near Salem.”

The feral smile spread still wider, crooked and sharp and spreading, like a crust on bread. “So you really could be the devil then.”

“Color me surprised that – um, that those events have reached – ”

“They reach,” said the wolf – Remus. A wolf’s name, anyway. He accepted the pipe when it was passed and blew practiced silver smoke rings. “They tell me your kind is in dear trouble.”

“It’s all very complicated,” said Sirius. “Burning or drowning will not kill a real witch or wizard but the hanging is very tricky. And any of it would kill a Muggle. It is almost exclusively the eccentric innocents among their own sort whom they sentence to death and there are not enough folk in the colony to keep this up for very long. The issue is that the symptoms presented by the victims are very real. And I am sure you can understand the rest.”

“Some,” said Remus. “Your Dark Lord has sent his emissaries and they boast about their accomplishments. Most of us do not have dealings with them directly. But we overhear.”

“What sort of dealings?”

“For gold,” Remus said, “and sometimes wands. Supplies – food, bandages. Healing potions, et cetera. I had a wand,” and the voice was wistful, “it’s with my things. West of here – West of Hadley, West of Deerfield. The edge of what – what your people know. What they have ever known. And anyway most of it abandoned since the last war. We would position ourselves upon the full moon about the villages and at moonset we would torch the buildings and the dead. But it has happened like this since the Plymouth landing. Half the time you hear about an Indian raid with children taken captive it is not Indians and they are not captives. Rather they cannot go home on account – well there is none, anymore. And not for them especially.”

“Is that how you – ”

“Yes,” with an upward golden flash of eyes, like a torch in the forest. “You recall the Hadley raid, ’75; I was very young. My family lived in the woods on account of my father was magic. I don’t recall – well, I could tell you he who bit me then is the same that did last night. Greyback is the name. He said he was banished from Plymouth long ago. Before your folk thought to buy and sell us mostly they would raid for supplies. But Greyback is terribly greedy. And he hates wizards. It gives him joy to think of taking their children.”

“If he hates wizards why is he meeting with He Who Must Not Be Named?”

“The Dark Lord offers us – ” Remus paused for a moment; looked askance, open hand frozen in a failed communicative gesture – “vengeance, you see; an opportunity to avenge ourselves upon those who have cast us out, who have starved us… Not unlike many of your Salem folk who see an opportunity to take vengeance upon their neighbors. It’s a compelling prospect,” he said, “and it’s also blinding.”

“How do you mean?”

“Voldemort will cull us like dogs when this is over,” Remus said. Sirius had heard no one invoke the Dark Lord by his name before. “Mark my words. I expressed as such to select among my pack a week ago. And this morning I wake up, and you are hovering over me, your big slaveringCù-Sìth, and I am thinking death has sent you to get me, and as you have told me something has ripped my whole gut out with teeth.”

“So it must have been Greyback.”

“Yes. He has not cared for me since I was young. And the more of us he can get to fight for Voldemort the more they will pay. He thinks himself smarter than them but he is not.”

“There’s not many out there smarter than Voldemort.”

“Perhaps your Dumbledore,” said Remus. “But he did sign the king’s death warrant.” Beneath the blankets when he stretched his joints made snapping percussive sounds (the birch forests, Sirius thought, in the winter ice storms). “And now he has sent you out here much too late.”

“Well, just in time for you.”

Remus paused but after a moment he begrudgingly said, “Yes.”

“You must know others who share your conviction.”

“Few of them would dare admit it.”

“We could speak to them – ”

“The vast majority would cut a wizard’s throat before he said a word,” said Remus. “They have been given no reason to trust any of your kind. I’ll speak with them. The dog can come with me.”

 --

EPISTOLARY

_A.D.,_

_I have found a wolf. He is called Remus and says his father was a wizard of the surname Lupin living on the outskirts of Hadley and killed there in the ’75 attacks. Until the last full moon he was a ward of the werewolf leader Greyback who commands several packs totaling at least sixty and who has allied with the Dark Lord. He pays them in gold and wands to conduct raids. In return for saving his life Lupin has agreed to escort me West through the frontier to meet with unaligned werewolves and other woodsfolk at their traveling camps and speak with them about our cause._

_I write additionally to ask you of news from Salem and Beverly (and Boston and Lexington) and I pray you tell me how goes our endeavor because I have not spoken to another human since I departed. No news reaches me in the woods and no one dares or cares to owl._

_Please send the phoenix tears because I have used them all. And the dittany and perhaps more potatoes._

_S.B._

_Mr. Black,_

_Enclosed the medical supplies requested, and wheat and potatoes and a bit of venison._

_I recall Lupin and his son from long ago when I was secluded in Hadley early in the 1670s by the minister John Russell. Vividly I recall the evening of Lupin’s murder and his son’s kidnap but it is a story much too detailed for this letter. I never knew much about the boy and indeed if he has been raised as you say who can attest as to his propriety or usefulness? Yet I commend your efforts and look forward to further results._

_In Salem authorities have arrested several more accused witches several of whom are members of the Church. Their prayerful status and arrest regardless seems to have added to the general air of hysteria. Several weeks ago magistrates reportedly interrogated for hours a four-year-old girl. Those questioned begin to name accomplices, and still more young women present symptoms._

_Among our brethren few have not fled Westerly but we have not lost a single member among the Order to accusations. A few of the alleged afflicted appear to be aligned with the Dark Lord and seek to implicate particular members of the community to achieve political ends. I regret to inform you that several among these are of the same petitioning families that won title to the settlement at Beverly with your ancestors – namely I mean Miss Bellatrix Lestrange, whose colorful testimonies have indicated she possesses quite the thespian flair. I will only tell you and Remus to tread as lightly as you can and that perhaps, for once, the further West you remain, the safer you may be._

_Best of luck to you,_

_A.D._

 --

THE WILDERNESS

The woods in those days were rather as they had been for centuries or longer and still among them there were paths white people had never tread and hills they had never climbed and vistas they had never seen and much among the territory was nameless or at least it was in any language they knew. It was April then and the spring wild warm with a humid taste like hope or life returned to the air though Sirius suspected by the sea still in the devil-besieged settlement it would be different. Mushrooms grew in the rich loam and flowers in the fields and new saplings in the bush and the rivers roared with snowmelt rushing from the north and they seethed and frothed at their depths with fat fish swimming toward the spawn. The birds called back and forth to each other warning patterns upon the sight and sound of Remus and the black dog and herds of deer watched them with their round eyes, motionless and taciturn and camouflaged so as to be near invisible amongst the mossy treetrunks until something spooked them and they bolted.

The sun moved and filtered through the green canopy in dappled patterns with a sweet rich warmth intercut by occasional thunderclouds and in the night the moon waned and the stars wheeled and blanketed in fine white jewels the expanse of sky between horizons. They camped and slept upon the ground and built a fire Sirius Disillusioned over which they heated scraps of meat for dinner and warmed their hands and feet against the night chill. And in the darkness he heard wolves and coyotes yapping to one another across their territory, and the nightcalls of animals – owls, mourning doves, bats – and the sounds of their wings.

In their walking they found the remains of settlements belonging to Indians and colonists alike, some bearing remnants of magic – varied in its age and origin and the manner of its casting – and there all the stone was cold and dew-damp, gathering shadow and darkness, and all the rough-hewn fences were collapsing, and from afar it was almost as though none of it had ever been. It sent a chill up Sirius’s spine to see how easily it could be eaten up again. Remus walked on as though he did not see anything there at all.

 --

TRUST

At first they did not speak much and neither would turn his back upon the other for very long. It seemed always that Remus had one eye upon Sirius’s wand and Sirius had one eye upon Remus’s teeth. They had been taught vivid and horrifying truth and legend alike about the bloodshed wrought by one another’s kind and they each considered themselves to have aligned with some sworn enemy and they each lay awake watching the other in their peripheral and wondering about the consequences of this tenuous allyship.

As they walked and spoke it became different. They were close in age and found perhaps they had not been raised much differently – both by relatively monstrous folk with Dark leanings who had wanted something quite different for them than what had come to pass. Sirius had learned a very refined and rehearsed magic at school and Remus had picked up from an assortment of woodsfolk and Indian traders something completely feral that he performed in silence and each was awed by the other and it was about this that they first began to talk.

Sometimes Remus seemed very like a human and sometimes he did not. Sirius could tell from how he moved in the forest and how he spoke. And from the marks upon his neck inside his collar where he had been commanded by his masters and had submitted to them in deference. His very stillness and how he would crouch to fill his canteen in the spring-swollen streams and rivers with his head still aloft and his eyes searching.

He walked with no sound and spoke quietly and even his breath was silent. He could not read nor write but he had been taught history and knew the old myths of the place from whence his forefathers had emigrated. There was some Scotch of his father’s still in his nimble accent and select among his grammar and vocabulary he would order as though he had grown up speaking some other language than English.

He did not like to be touched even casually or by accident and would withdraw abruptly. He rarely laughed. His smile was crooked and his teeth were very sharp. He told Sirius about the magic he had learned from his father when he was very young in Hadley before everything. He had nearly died in fever after his turning and Greyback had brought him back around with unicorn blood administered over the course of several weeks; it had caused him elaborate hallucinations he still recalled on occasion in his dreams. He told Sirius some about Greyback who had been banished from the settlement as a young man when he was thought to have killed a girl in his village and at trial had failed the ordeal of touch.

He asked about Sirius’s family and listened with furrowed brow. When Sirius told of his disowning he looked as though he wanted to say something but he did not. He asked about what it was like to live in the coastal towns and about the food they grew and harvested and ate and the churches and schools they went to and the things they owned. The books they read and the houses they lived in. And he asked about Boston and Sirius told him about the hanging of pirates there and the displaying of their broken bodies upon the outlying islands.

 --

FANTASTIC BEASTS

Remus knew where there dwelled others like and unlike him in shaded copses at convergences of streams, near berry brambles and deer tracks, territory marked and warded with primitive magic, pagan constructions and odd, unfamiliar spells learned from Indians. He would bid Sirius turn to the dog and they would walk together through the fuzzy humming and Remus would call out in a language Sirius sometimes did not recognize.

Some were young and some were old. They might have a spell half in their mouths or rusted flintlock pistols drawn – most did not have wands – just from the feeling of the wards breaking. Then they would sight them, and they would say, “Remus.”

He did not ask how Remus knew them. They would bring tea, lukewarm in chipped ceramic, and stale biscuits, and they would give the dog a pet. Some were Sirius’s own kind and some were like Remus – but they were thinner still and skittish like deer – and some were men from the waist up and down they were horses. In the silted bending ponds askance the Connecticut they spoke to a mermaid who emerged from the muck, gray skin and wild ragged hair, to ask them riddles when they stopped to drink. They met with two vampire women in a shack outside Deerfield who made Remus laugh with filthy jokes and put a little saucer of sweet wine on the floor for the dog. And somewhere so West there were no paths in the forest to tread – they followed only some animal sense of Remus’s between the hills and rivers – they came upon a gathering of Indian women smoking fish. The sight of them shocked Remus and Sirius to stillness before the women chased them from the environs, shooing with hands and fabric and sticks and sharp words bitter as chicory. Laced in their language, the unfamiliar and ragged magic, ancient and territorial, that Sirius had been tasting metallic in the back of his throat for weeks. “They don’t want anything to do with any of this,” Remus explained later as they tried to catch their own fish for dinner with little more than string and grubs. “If all the white people in the colony killed each other it would be hell of easier for them would it not?”

To all of the folk they met Remus would say, “Have you heard talk of Voldemort,” and then he would see what they would say. More than once they left with an admonition to never come back and only once they ran, from one of the centaurs, for at least a mile in the swarming night forest before they gauged themselves far enough Sirius could turn human and grab Remus by the forearm and Apparate them both back to the clearing where they had camped the night before.

The vampires had heard select among their race – those living in the hills and caves West of the settlement at Northampton – had joined the ranks of Death Eaters for the promise of blood and vengeance. Some of the feral witches and wizards had been courted too by masked folk in black cloaks who flattered or threatened then disappeared. Even the mermaid tried to explain her encounter in a language neither of them understood and settled for charades.

The werewolves they met would shake Remus’s hand and pull him into a rough embrace to catch the scent. “Greyback’s,” they would say, warily and braced to fight, and Remus would say, “No longer.”

They sat about the fire, the dog at Remus’s feet. Sometimes they would serve to Remus a potent and clear homebrewed moonshine that made him loopy for hours afterwards. Each of them startled at the slightest sounds from the woods. Without the strength of a pack they were vulnerable. They hunted where they could but the older ones among them could scarcely walk upright with the stress of years and the moon ripening, stringing tight the animal backbone. One, a teenage girl, dark of skin, spoke to Remus in a wild patois of Indian language and animal snarls and occasional proper nouns sounding like spellwords and viciously angular in their speech – _Voldemort. Dumbledore. Salem_.

They best any of them could do was say they would not join Voldemort’s ranks and they would keep an ear peeled to the forest.

 --

THE BURNING SPELL

Together they walked West and West and still West into the ending of the ending of the ending of the day. They crossed unnamed rivers swimming or on unmanned ferries and the summer rolled Northerly on a long low breeze. The foliage was thick and vivid green and they walked in it amongst the hills and slept at night in caves or in the burntout shells of houses and barns left behind in raids.

At night he would show Remus spells. On his own he had learned _Accio_ and _Lumos_ and _Protego,_ which he performed with Sirius’s wand, a shaky, windblown, feral magic that made the hair on the back of Sirius’s neck stand on end. “Try this one,” Sirius said, demonstrating on their small fire. “ _Coniglacio_.”

It took Remus three tries before the fire went cold and he could press his long white fingers all the way to the blue base and filter in them the red glowing kindling and charcoal. When he lifted his hand again the skin was black with soot and ash. “We should go out West,” Sirius said, watching him, “and get your wand.”

Remus breathed through his noise not a sigh nor a huff but something like a horse or a dog snorting in the cold. “I can’t go back there ever again. He’ll finish what he started.”

“We could go back when they’re out raiding.”

Remus watched at the fire and it reflected like a small sun in his eyes and with Sirius’s wand he lifted the spell. “They’ll have burned,” he started, but he didn’t go on. Sirius rather understood the feeling of having scorched the earth behind oneself upon some forced departure and the guilty ache accompanying: _perhaps you should have stuck it out, perhaps you should have tried_ … He was about to offer sympathies but Remus said abruptly, “What do you do for hanging.”

“It’s very complicated,” Sirius explained. “You make a pillow of air under your feet that holds you up – then there is a spell, a very hard kind of spell that makes you appear dead, then when they cut you down, you can lift it. The lifting it is very hard to do yourself so you are supposed to have an accomplice. So three spells – and two of them you must sustain at once – and all of them wandless and wordless – while pretending you’re suffocating to death.”

“Teach it to me.”

“It took me months to learn.”

Remus just looked at him in the gold shadow spreading though the dark. “Teach it to me.”

 --

THE HANGING SPELL

_“Aerpulvinus_.”

_“Mors falsa.”_

_“Reanimatus.”_

_\--_

A FIGHT

Remus would speak about his past under duress only and never at length. When the subject was invoked with the woodsfolk they met he would allow great silences to answer certain of their questions. In mid-April they were fed a rich midday meal by a woman of Remus’s kind. She wore a soft buckskin eyepatch, blackened by sun and hardly serving to cover the great scraping white wound across her face, and it seemed she had long ago been one of Greyback’s herself before she too had been banished and left bloodied for dead in the forest. Not for the first time Sirius wondered how many there were, and how many had not lived. How many bones shaded and tangled in the wooded bowers could have belonged to Remus. And what form the bones would take – lupine or human? “I recall,” said their host, after a few cups of dandelion wine she’d produced to wash down her roast venison and boiled potatoes, “you were his very favorite. Near the tail end of my time.”

Remus stiffened in the shoulders and in his eye a storm blew over. Sirius looked to their host and saw she recognized she should not have asked. An unspoken thing passed between them in their own language. “Long ago,” Remus said, finally. Silence spread like rancid butter.

Even in the dog’s mind Sirius wondered about the connotation. He had been curious about those who had been the favorites of professors at school and he recalled that about some rumor had quietly spread in the classrooms and the dusty halls. They left shortly after, awkwardly, and Sirius switched skins rather as soon as he thought it safe. “What did she mean?”

“About what.”

“You being his very favorite.”

Remus looked heavenward like a human would for patience. “It was long ago,” he said again, “I was young. He said he thought I would take his place one day. I don’t know if it was true.”

“What did – ”

“I won’t speak about this with you.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand,” Remus said, and Sirius saw when he stepped closer the yellow shade that stuck in his eyes. “You won’t ever. You don’t know what it was like – what it is like. He made me.”

“God made you,” said Sirius, though he hardly believed it.

“There’s no God,” said Remus. An unfamiliar bitter ache in his voice, some vast wound unhealed so long as to fester. To rot down to the grist and bone and to spread. “I thought you knew that, wizard. There’s men who pretend. And deluded folk who believe them. And so by that logic maybe he is God. Or maybe Dumbledore is, or maybe Voldemort.”

Whatever was welling in his chest was some feeling he could not name. He tackled Remus to the ground and they rolled in the leaf loam raising the mulching rot smell of it, the locust husks and the worms, soft soil, tree roots knuckling at their bones. Somehow he got atop Remus (he later realized Remus must’ve let him), held him down by the shoulders – both breathing hard in the scuffle and dirt in their hair and bruises rising – and beneath his hands Remus’s skin was warm. Like a caught sunburn, or like sand, like the water in the streams, warm. And Remus’s mouth was just open and for the life of him he could not recall exactly why he had been so very angry such a very short time ago.

The chest – the hips beneath him stirred. The feral amber eyes, the nervous hands. It was an animal thing; he recalled it in the dog’s mind, surfacing for a moment just beyond his own. Remus lifted his chin enough it stretched his long white neck supple and smooth like the spinal flesh of a mushroom. Bite it, Sirius thought, somewhere, God, some secret mind. Bite it, bite him there, have him there, hold him down, and show him.

Show him what? An old scar cut the base of the neck beneath Remus’s limp collar; someone already had, and the knots were pale with age. He would have touched it, opened the button at the collar and felt the pulse in it, but Remus shoved his hips up, and at first Sirius thought perhaps they were really going to fight, until he realized the long and molten drag of pleasure (the attendant guilty rush of his Puritan upbringing aside) was not a mistake. Remus did it again and Sirius felt his mouth fall open, any number of lubricants (the guilt, the pleasure, the horror, the fear) loosening the bolt of his jaw. And “Yes,” Remus said, from under him, voice raw, breath in it. Moaned, Sirius would have said maybe if he knew what a moan sounded like. If he had ever given anyone cause to moan in pleasure once in his life before.

He felt the voice in the body and Remus set a clammy hand against his hip and orchestrated their movement, tidal against one another, kinetic. Sirius thought of a clock, or a gun. Simple machines, energy transfer. Remus’s fingernails so tight against his skin Sirius thought they might draw blood – hoped they would, somewhere. Then he could not bring himself to think about anything at all.

\-- 

AFTERWARDS

“Have you before?” said Remus.

“No,” he said, “have you?”

“Yes.” He sat up, knees cracking. “Have you your tobacco?”

They packed the pipe and smoked. His every limb was limp and the humid dampness in his trousers was beginning to become uncomfortable. It had happened several times before in dreaming and each time he would wake, humiliated utterly, recalling the sermons of his youth, brimstone-black – nauseous hell, spitting fire, low in the belly – your every living pleasure twisted wrong and raw and brought back upon you knives.

Remus kept looking at him with his lips just parted and Sirius in his muscle more than mind recalled the tightening calibration, pleasure coiling like rope in the long body. The spice of loam and sweat winding – like smoke and fog. Something twitched. He thought he should ask Remus, with whom before? But he did not. When he thought on it later he did not want to know.

_\--_

COMPELLED AND CONJURED

Come the end of the month they had walked and Apparated back and forth across the colony nearly to its edges and those among Remus’s acquaintances they had not found he suspected were dead or hiding. They were low on supplies and Sirius knew he should report to Dumbledore. And of course there was a great silent thing strung between them bleeding and at night when they slept in the bush in separate bedrolls across the banked and Disillusioned fire Sirius felt in his stomach some twisting and nameless knot slowly tightening.

They Apparated back to the cabin at sunset and worked together through the wards and lit the stubs of candles that remained inside. They threw the shutters open against the stuffiness and scrounged for food and ate a small meal of scraps as dusk gathered, night drawing in against itself its dark skirts, and the swelling moon pulled above the blackening night edge of trees, and the stars scattered like thrown marbles – like sun on sea.

Sirius remained at the table to compose a letter to Dumbledore by candlelight and Remus lay in the bed. It was far too hot for a fire and the light dim and golden orange as autumn as it spread in the room. In Sirius’s periphery as he wrote he saw the shadow of motion across the room as Remus undid what buttons remained upon his shirt. Then, bending his knees, he slid his long bare feet up the bed, snake slither in the cotton and wool, and his right knee he swayed idly, open and shut, open and shut, and he drifted one hand off the mattress so it rested nearly upon the floor where he tapped each finger slow and rhythmic against the thumb and finally Sirius realized he had not put a single word down upon the page now for several minutes.

He turned to Remus who was looking at him and they watched at one another through the thick syrup light that shifted upon the floor with the guttering of the candleflames. Remus’s eyes had set aglow and he did not say anything or at least not with his mouth. The neck of his shirt had opened just enough to show one rosy nipple and though Sirius had seen all of him before resoundingly naked the night they had met the sight dried his mouth out.

As though compelled he went to Remus and they lay together in the bed and undressed each other against the heat and Sirius found their lips so close he closed the gap between them and Remus – unlike himself, like startled prey – went very still. He tasted like their sparse meal and like his own hunger, like salt, and his bones were sharp and even; under his skin was a kind of backgammon set, and when Sirius touched any of his old silvery scars he would hold himself again very still to keep from shivering.

The yearning came from everywhere their skin touched and from another world. And from some kindling burning between them spread from a strike of lightning and roaring now in the low loam. He recalled the old dreams wherein he ran headlong into something trembling and golden and how long ago he had thought it magic of the sort he could never touch. Of course it was not magic but it seemed not dissimilar; when Remus’s back arched toward him – shock of skin, rush of warmth, raw breath sound escaped from his throat – he was awed for a moment that it could exist, and it could be seen, and he could conjure it.

\-- 

RITUAL I (NECROPASTORAL)

The moon came gestating into itself as ever and for a few days before it grew to full Remus did not sleep and could hardly walk from aching. At dusk Sirius sealed the cabin again within the wards and bound his wand to his ankle with thin twine and they waited together at the edge of the clearing for moonrise. He thought perhaps he should ask, is it odd to be just with me? But if course it was, and he could tell it, in the vocal silence. Finally he asked “How do you feel.”

“It hurts terribly,” Remus said, “even now. The sharp – ” His voice shook, and his hands – the starlight – he could feel, Sirius realized, the moon pulling up, lifting like some puppet, from beneath the horizon. “I wish my skin…” He couldn’t go on. “The dog,” he said, then – whispered, in his disappearing voice – “Sirius. Please.”

Its emotions were simpler and it could lie in the loam and whine in sympathy with its paw over its muzzle while Remus screamed and twisted as though he were pulled apart by magnets. The pain – the light sweeping up through the trees – bent him double. Ran him through like a sword and his back arched high around it and did not fall. The tailored buttons of his spine tore open into a long and bristled gray hackle and the coat emerged from the skin about the hollow belly and the wide ribcage. And the sound from the stretching throat became a wild tearing howl vivid and aching as the sheer white moonlight itself.

When the animal had emerged wholly from him panting its breath in the residual pain of its birth it came to the dog and pawed the dirt, and together they ran deep into the sweating forest, deep enough the thick canopy blacked the moon out near completely and in the dark they scrapped with teeth and pinned each other and ran in the wild summer streams and sniffed out deer they chased for miles until two stags threatened them back with spreads of bloody antlers peeling velvet. They ran – sleek gray and black stretches, thin lithe muscle, ribs like piano ivory visible even now – Easterly toward the sea while the forest thinned, its trees cut for lumber, into the spreading fields of the settlement, rasping through the corn and the wheat and the thin rye, until they saw the thin light of oil lamps and the dog steered the wolf back into the woods. They drank at a mossy well and crept about the stone foundations of an abandoned home in search of squirrels to eat and they fought each other over the scraps. About the rear of the premises they sniffed around a row of old graves enclosed in collapsed wrought-iron and felt a current of cold reaching from the earth and ran from that place and on and on until they tripped one another and rolled and snapped their teeth.

Near moonset he could see Remus come back to it first in the mind and then the body and he wondered in the dog’s mind what the animal thought of the man. It must have hurt nearly the same – the sharpness beneath the skin – for the creature lay supplicant on its belly and whimpered and gnawed at its paws and forelimbs until the dog trotted forward and batted its muzzle away. But what did the wolf know of Remus beyond what Remus knew of the wolf? _There’s this other me always trying to get me killed_.

 --

RITUAL II

“Cù-Sìth,” Remus whispered when he woke. His voice was gone from screaming. He reached with his white hands for the dog’s ruff and wove his fingers deep, behind the ears, about the jaw. The dog licked his neck, the sharp bone at his collar, smudging blood like charcoal in the white dawn, and Sirius shifted back into his human skin, kissed Remus by the jaw and beneath his ear, pinned his far shoulder to the warm wet earth. The thrumming skin – new as it was, and clammy with dew, and warm from running – all of it white against the dark summer ground. What ritual is this, he wondered, tracing the ribs – he had Remus by the mouth and their teeth clashed. Remus who was so very pale and naked in the dawn fog (rolling, inexorably, from the sea) that his skin seemed luminous.

There must have been some spell in some old book too dark even for the Blacks that would give him instruction on what to do henceforth. What runes and patterns to delineate upon the soil – what brew to have bubbling adjacent in a cauldron set upon a fire. What exactly he must do to Remus (darkest creature) and how. What rough beast, summarily, would be vexed to nightmare by their ritual. After all if the world ended it would all be over.

He thought unguiltily of Remus upon the red velvet and furs of his parents’ marriage bed in the homestead in Beverly. The bedstead carven and the hangings embroidered throughout with the rounded key brand of the Blacks. Remus – a kind of mirror of a lover who could read his mind. Echoed his movements, shifting hips, ribs, heels. The inside of his knee, the join of his hip and thigh – rare unspoiled flesh – or the great scar trembling across his belly, muscles wound in pleasure tight as a harp string – Remus who deserved a bed, to be made love to in a bed with tenderness, to be licked clean and wrapped in blankets. Remus who was a wolf and who had had from others only his lovely red mouth in the dirt. Raised like an animal. Could not set foot – the silver wards – in any wizard’s house in Massachusetts Bay.

“Sirius,” said Remus now – voice ragged, and nails, and knuckles. Hand in his hair catching strands of it, against the back of his neck – clammy with dew, sweat, the ghost of blood. And in the air – salt. Violent salt – blood, sea. Saltgrass and away across the hills the cold dunes. Salted fields, and the sand spreading. The ocean coming in in in on the cold tide swelling until the whole world drowned. “Please,” Remus said. For what Sirius did not know and neither of them could say. “Come here. You’re so far from me…”

He agreed and yet did not know how to be closer. It seemed Remus did and at first Sirius wondered how anyone could desire something that might so easily tear them along the very seams – let alone someone who had been unsewn and resewn twice since sunset. “There’s a spell,” Remus said, and he cast it, wordless, wandless, sleepless, hungry; perhaps he was the most powerful young wizard Sirius had ever known, but the thought was surmounted quickly, rabidly, by Remus’s clammy hand guiding his by the wrist, how soft the skin between the legs, and slick from his magic, and warm (like sun-warmed stone), and warmer still inside – womb-warm, Sirius thought, like sinking into summer silt – and how sweet his breath and the rapid jolting catch of it, the smell at his jaw and neck and ear like loam and sweat, woodsmoke, saltwater tang of blood. “Come here,” he said again – compulsion in it, like the old stories. Heel against the back of Sirius’s thigh, straining anticipation, hips shifting against the fallen leaves, black oranges of some long-dead autumn decaying. Sirius did – how could he not? – and Remus’s eyes widened by degrees, not in pleasure and not in pain, his lips parted, his breath stilled a moment before again he caught it.

Sirius suspected he would be killed for this if anyone ever bore witness but in itself it was almost like dying. He would have forfeited his complete soul to Remus in awe or terror that such a feeling could be – Remus who had put first his head back then his shoulders to show his neck and his white belly, the long perfect supple arch of him and the skin moon-blue, dawn-colored and healing, warm against the warm earth – who cupped him chin to cheekbone in one long trembling hand and pressed them together by the mouth – kissed him tasting salt and chalk and a whole young life’s desperate lonely hunger in his mouth like drowning or better. In a moment of shocking and brilliant blinding clarity he thought, no wonder people believe in the devil, or God or witchcraft, or in sin, or in goodness. Remus’s hand against his chest slipped lower and where they touched Sirius could feel every cord of him tuned like an instrument. Artful in construction and with every curve purposeful. Sculpted – shaped, set – by some revered master. The rising keening in his throat like the tone that opened a symphony. Then like a spool of fine ribbon he unraveled beneath Sirius, the timbre breaking, the undertow following the crest of a wave. With hardly warning the world turned gold, then white then grey again, and the dawn spread into the early day, and his head was on Remus’s stomach, and Remus was combing a hand through his hair.

If they had called forth any apparition from the unseen world it was gone now and Remus was humming something soft and sweet – not a hymn but some old folk song the like of which Sirius had never heard – and beneath his ear the sound trembled in the skin and the warm grist beneath, the muscle and the bone, the very blood. How could he ever have doubted? He traced his hand along the vivid blue vein vibrant beneath the skin of Remus’s thigh and one of Remus’s ragged fingernails snagged on the outermost shell of his ear. “Are you alright?” he asked, and he felt the echo of his own voice in Remus’s belly, and he felt Remus when he said “Yes, yes.” A lithe laugh, quiet and stretching, like a cat in the sun. “It’s – like thunder and lightning.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” said Remus, “it was a shock all through me, and then it spread all over, and it was so loud…” He laughed – a kind of coming rain sound in the laugh, and he shifted, and his bare feet moved in the leaves, and Sirius heard his stomach rumbling, and his heartbeat. “I thought I would drown. But you had me.”

“I did,” said Sirius, “I do. And you have me.”

Remus sighed, and his ribs creaked, and in Sirius’s hair his nimble hands stilled, and Sirius kissed his belly once more and drew away.

In the pale white dawn they Apparated together home and worked through the wards and Remus fell asleep spread across the bed entire as Sirius rubbed an eyedropperful of the dittany Dumbledore had sent by owl into the wounds upon his hands. He woke again around noon and they walked in the woods, killed a grouse and roasted it upon the fire, dripping fat snapping in the flames, and they were eating together messily, laughing, on the cabin’s molding stoop when an owl circled in the closing summer ring of tree canopy above and glided into a descent.

\-- 

EPISTOLARY II

_Mr. Black,_

_Thank you sincerely for the update on your mission received April 30. I appreciate the good work you and Mr. Lupin have done colluding with our magical brethren beyond the Western frontier._

_I apologize for the haste of this letter but I must summon you to Beverly as soon as is possible. Four among our contingent have been arrested by the Salem sheriff and I will not deny I could desperately use the spellpower to take over for our lost brethren in defending Muggle citizens from the worst of Voldemort’s curses and hexes. Since you have been gone so long from the colony I do believe you “safe” from any accusation of witchery upon your return so long as you steer as clear as possible from your family and their acquaintances._

_Please Apparate post-haste to my lodgings in Lexington and I will brief you on what has transpired in your absence._

_Yours sincerely,_

_A.D._

Remus was standing in the door with such an expression that Sirius knew he had divined the news from the look upon his own face. In Remus’s hair was a small downy grouse feather and the wounds upon his hands were healing and his mouth was still very red from being kissed. Behind him it was becoming afternoon, and the leaves were green and the sun very low, and the birds called from the forest. And Sirius could think of nothing to do or say and it seemed Remus could not either. What could he have done? They were each obligated by blood to another larger something and the previous night seemed already not unlike a dream. Remus watched Sirius begin to gather his scant things and eventually he covered his mouth with his hand.

“Be careful,” Sirius blurted, “keep an eye – ”

“Do you think I’ll stay in this place without you?” His voice was like ice upon the river at the first frost. “I’m going West.”

It was like a knife. Still Sirius said, “Be safe.”

“I wish you would be,” Remus said. He shifted and the wind through the door took the grouse feather from his hair. “How do you know what he says is true and how do you know it’s even him?”

“I know his writing.”

“You mean to tell me there’s no spell for forgery?”

There was; it was undifficult, and Sirius had been forging his father’s signature with it since he was thirteen. Dumbledore’s bird had brought the letter, which had convinced him as to its legitimacy, but he doubted it would assuage Remus’s concerns. “I owe Dumbledore,” said Sirius, “I made a pact against the Dark Lord.”

“So did I,” said Remus. “He asks you to walk into your very death. Not even at the Dark Lord’s hands but – ”

“I can do the hanging spell if it comes to it.”

“They will starve you in prison; can you manage it then?” He folded his arms tightly over his chest. “They can be really quite cruel, Muggles. And selfish to boot. I’ve seen it. You cannot trust them.”

“You’re one to talk, werewolf.”

“And you,” said Remus, hackles rising, “wizard.”  

They were very quiet for a moment and in the quietude Sirius heard the wind stirring in the forest, low and soft and smelling such that he knew later in the afternoon it would draw a thunderstorm West from the sea. He chewed off a fingernail, then he said, “How will I find you after it’s over?”

It was too smart and too rich a thing to leave so easily for either of them. It was like a place where morel mushrooms would come back again into the vibrant earth year after year.

Remus pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Then he took them away, and he did not look at Sirius when he said, “Half a day or so walk West-Northwest of Northampton the river comes down in cascades through this sharp slate canyon. And then it evens out wide and shallow and unless Greyback finds me again that is where I will be.”

Unsaid between them: with all likelihood it would never be over. On the threshold he leant Remus up against the doorframe and kissed him, tender, but Remus held his arm so tightly he was sure by nightfall it would begin to bruise black and ache. He went out into the clearing to Apparate and he heard the soft footfalls behind him upon the grass and the warmth of the presence at his back; the blur of the face was the last he saw before the crack and the spinning and the tight dark squeeze.

 --

ARREST

It was late in the evening when the dark strangling tunnel of his Apparition spit Sirius back out in the shadow of a wooded well on the outskirts of Beverly. There had only been time for an hour’s layover at Dumbledore’s farm in Lexington. The surviving members of the Order had bustled about uneasily preparing potions in the barn and divining potential futures in tealeaves and few dared meet one another’s eyes for very long, fearing perhaps a spy amongst them. Select among the contingent had disguised themselves as Muggles from Boston with Polyjuice they drank continually from a flask at their belts and still others had magically altered the structure of their faces or Disillusioned themselves so inexpertly they appeared like motion blurs. A few asked Sirius about his sojourn at the frontier and he found himself continually adjusting his collar to cover the bruising red marks Remus had left at his throat. From those most talkative or those whose vigilance had been lowered with alcohol Sirius learned the names of the fallen and the disappeared and the latest offensives of the Dark Lord. Another Order member, Dorcas Meadowes, had been arrested at her family farm not hours previous, having been accused by Bellatrix Lestrange of appearing in her dreams and pinching her skin with long black fingernails. News had reached Dumbledore’s farm care of Peter Pettigrew, who had witnessed her arrest and ridden South post-haste, cape flying. Dorcas joined at least twenty suspected witches detained at prison in Salem village and she was already very dearly missed by the Order, of whom she had been by far the most adept at mixing Polyjuice. Meanwhile folk said the Dark Lord had allied with many of the creatures of the wood as a kind of standing army and now he prepared with the help of his accomplices accusing villagers at Salem to eradicate his entire magical foe. Once no wizard dared stand in his way it would be short work to wipe out the non-magical population in Massachusetts Bay and move Southerly.

Dumbledore had ordered Sirius back to Beverly much to his chagrin. Upon his disinheritance he had sworn to return to the place only over his own dead body and on account of how shortly his own corpse seemed forthcoming going back to those lands seemed an undue courtship of death. But he had made a vow against the Dark Lord and could not shirk the promise. He was to Disillusion himself and guard the Salem perimeter against those Death Eaters certainly coming from the Black and Lestrange land in Beverly to cast curses upon more Muggle children in Salem and he figured this assignment could not be more harrowing than the Western woods.

He walked to the town border, demarcated by a rough stone wall, trying to step like Remus lightly in the dry leaves and as he did the waning moon lifted as if drawn by a string into the sky. He sat upon the wall and smoked his pipe and listened to the forest. He kept defensive spells upon the tip of his tongue and his wand concealed as best he could manage in his sleeve. Sound symphonic. Animal steps, snake slithers, wind and leaves; the creak of the trees swaying by the trunk.

He was thinking of Remus who would be waiting for him somewhere beyond the frontier. West of the scant and besieged hill settlements and West even of the wreckage left beyond Deerfield in King Phillip’s War. West beyond anything where none other of Sirius’s kind dared tread where they could lie together again in the forest upon the leaf loam in the spreading dawn. In the dim light rising out of the earth and the dew. And where none – beast nor man – would dare challenge their sovereignty over land or magic or any of the rest.

In the thinking of Remus and the grand impossible hypothetical he did not hear the quiet steps from the West until they were upon him, wands out – Rodolphus Lestrange, Theodore Nott, Malfoy and his frigid wife – and their faces, recalled from his childhood, drawn tight with famine thinness and nights spent sleepless, sallow and pale as dough. He got a curse off – _Rictumsempra!_ – that Nott dodged but he caught Malfoy’s full-body bind square in the chest and went board-rigid, heart skipping. His wand was snatched from his grip and Malfoy’s wife bound his hands in fraying rope and at that moment as he had predicted it began to rain.

He had last seen them all laughing amongst each other about Muggle torture in his parents’ drawing room. Now apparently they had chosen entirely a new approach to the subject. “Another one for Reverend Parris,” said Nott, smirking. Sirius would have spat at his feet, but he couldn’t move.

“This makes how many of Dumbledore’s in Salem prison?”

“Six,” Rodolphus lisped through his crooked front teeth. “Auspicious numerals.”

They tittered amongst themselves at the invocation of the devil. Malfoy said, “To think this was heir to the Black fortune.”

“Rather embarrassing I should say,” quoth Nott. He was trying very hard to sound dismayed but there was a sinister laugh caught in his throat that reached his words. Malfoy’s wife had already begun to giggle in bubbly bursts through her nose. “What with the – well. It was quite enough for his poor parents when he cavorted with Muggles let alone with beasts.”

Every nerve in Sirius thrilled in righteous anger and he would have lunged for a fistfight but he was bound so thoroughly not even his eyebrows moved. They grasped his coat by the collar and dragged him through the woods toward Salem Village, where the church was lit brightly for the evening sermon and select of the sheriff’s deputies paced upon the common lawn, visages and guttering gaslamps smeared in color and indistinct in the deluge.

 --

EXAMINATION

He was stripped of his clothing and laid out naked upon the kitchen table of the doctor’s house and even as he fought each of his limbs was held down against the table by one of the village magistrates. And low around him in the darkness with faces candlelit, shadowed in a sickly yellow glow, hovered the doctor himself, who doubled as the town coroner, and Parris, the minister.

“Be still, Black,” said Parris. Someone held a gaslamp so close against his skin he could feel the heat. He closed his eyes and listened to their clothing rustling and the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears and he felt cold hands upon his skin searching followed by something small and sharp – a sewing pin – with which the doctor prodded his every birthmark. The dark and round and raised ones he had had since birth upon his collar and shoulders and under his arms and inside his thigh; he flinched at every prod but at some he did not bleed. He recalled Remus who had traced them all into patterns like constellations while together they lay in bed. Someone made notes upon a pad.

Like stars, he thought, and they turned him to lie upon his stomach, and he was still now without being held. It was not the stars themselves that made constellations but it was the space between – it was absence as much as substance. They touched him elsewhere with the pin and catalogued those from whence he bled and the texture and color of his blood and the quantity. After a while they allowed him to sit and dress.

There were eleven marks upon his body that were insensitive and thus the minister and magistrates considered it highly likely they were witch’s teats at which he had allowed his familiars and imps to suckle his blood. He nearly out and told them, it doesn’t work that way.

 --

TOUCH TEST

They brought him next to the meetinghouse where he was blindfolded with a strip of rough black cloth. The screams from within were symphonic and they verged upon the guttural. Choking screams, summoning screams. Death screams, screaming until they vomited, and following they would scream again, until the acid made them hoarse. They spoke in tongues and he heard them fall and writhe upon the floor with their shoes scuffing. Their skirts made water sounds. They all smelled bitter with a sick sweat.

Each of them had been too long abed with fear. A prayer was recited and he was led blind into the seething throng of them until he touched one altogether by accident upon the shoulder and she froze. Beneath his hand he felt her hunched and tangled bones unfold like an insect in chrysalis. The emptied lungs filled again with breath. His blindfold was removed – it was Bellatrix. The glue trap grin in her eyes did not reach her mouth; it was for him alone. It was like the way she had smiled at him when they were young and she had set him up to take the blame for some act of bloody sadism perpetuated upon the Blacks’ farm animals. But now she screamed again and he was pulled away, bound at the wrists by the sheriff’s men, and he saw her enfolded in the welcoming prayerful arms of the doctor and the minister, sobbing, him, him, I saw him, it was him, I saw him.

 --

FUGUE I

He did not see the warrant for his arrest but was informed as to its existence as he was brought by the minister and the sheriff’s men to a cell in the village’s grievously overcrowded prison. In the drafty and humid wattle-and-daub construction fifty suspected witches were housed. Already several among the accused had begun to sicken due to the poor conditions and most among them were too weak as to even lift their heads upon Sirius’s arrival. Most were women, tall and pale and narrow with dull and matted hair, eyes bright with hunger, clothing torn and stained.

Amongst the jailers he heard that they were awaiting the convening of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to conduct the trials but no one seemed to know exactly when that might be. They were brought crusts of bread and clay cups of bitter water once or twice a day at odd hours and sometimes they were brought nothing at all. Some mornings past his cell the jailers dragged by the ankles corpses draped in rough black cloth for burial in the far fields. And at all hours of the day there was sobbing and screaming and the night chill and the dampness stuck in the stone and would not be rid even in daylight.

Those confined with him did not speak for fear somewhere there were other folk listening. They thought themselves besieged by devils or that this was a test of God’s contrived to gauge the purity of their faith. Sirius thought of Remus’s insistence that God Himself was contrived and he listened with a clinical remove to their rapid mutterings as they prayed. It seemed they had come to believe for certain the world was ending just as soon as it had begun and Sirius found on that he could not much argue their point. After this what would be? He could not foresee. What was beyond the frontier? What was beyond death?

Days went in and out like tide and increasingly he found he could not think for the hunger. None of the Order came to see him to offer even the barest hope and he heard no news from his fellow incarcerated and one day he watched the jailers lead Marlene McKinnon past his cell but he was so weak he did not think to acknowledge her until she was gone. Sometimes at night he lay awake wanting desperately to do magic just to prove he still could. He could feel it under his skin and stirring volcanic inside his own mind like burning sugar and he suspected someday very soon it would just come bubbling up out of him entirely outside his volition.

How long passed? He could not say. He would ask the jailers for the date but it would not stick for long inside his head. He watched at the movement of the sun and the moon and the stars in the window and thought of Remus.

 --

CONFESSION

He did not know where he was or to whom he spoke but he recalled walking, wrists tied, escorted by the sheriff’s men, across the town common in the muggy sunset. It was late Spring by the smell of the air, and the sea wind from the West, the foliage thick and green, fear ripe as fruit. When they sat him down again and untied him his head swam. He felt blackness crawl over his skin like insects but someone hit him hard enough across the face it dissipated, and the sound of the slap echoed in the room. He smelled sterility, old sweat. In his wandering vision the high windows solidified and in them a catch of moon. On the sharp yellow fingernail edge of it his heart snagged, momentary, reaching through the skin. After some time he was given a crust of moldy bread and a cup of bitter water and he begged for more to eat but nothing was given.

Speech, footsteps. The wind from outside, and the smell of the gaslamps. Blackness above – clouds stretching over, pulling apart like grey cotton.

“Sirius Black,” said someone finally. He could hear the room breathing. Outside in the darkness someone screamed. “You stand charged with sundry acts of witchcraft committed upon the bodies of Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam, Bellatrix Lestrange, Rebecca Nott…”

The afflicted were brought into the meetinghouse with riotous circus cacophony and Sirius listened beyond their cries to the wind and the fever roaring inside his own mind and to the silence from the townsfolk in the pews and to the distant timbre of their fear rumbling like far-off thunder. The magistrate asked if anyone would care to bring forth a petition in Sirius’s defense; no one dared. He went on, and he spoke now to the girls, and as he did Sirius sought their eyes. The youngest among them – Muggle, brunette curls limp, rail-thin with famine – could not have been ten years old, and when their eyes met she screamed, he hurt me, he hurt me, he hurt me: her child voice small and hoarse and brittle and shattering (birches bending under ice) in the still and humid air.

The girls’ cries drowned out the magistrate and from the crowd a woman screamed, How oft have you eat and drunk your own damnation? And one of the girls shrieked and pointed and said that she saw a man-shape black as fabric or silt or night standing beside Sirius in that very room and whispering into his ear.

“Does the devil advise you now?” said the magistrate.

Said Sirius, “I can’t tell you when the devil works.” His voice was hardly sound and entirely without meaning he thought, _sonorous_ , and he tried again. “I can’t tell you when the devil works.”

Silence in the room but for a whimper from one of the afflicted girls.

“I’ve never spoken to him myself,” said Sirius – the echo of his voice perhaps inside his own mind alone. “But I do believe select among us in this room intimately acquainted.”

“One of your accusers has been eyewitness to your transforming from a man to a black dog.” A wave of hushed whispers passed about the courtroom. “The same black dog the devil has sent to commune with many among your sorcerer brethren. And you tell me you have never spoken to the devil?”

“He does not command me.”

“Then who does?”

He did not speak.

“What do you say to the accusations that you have been conducting devilish rituals under the full moon?”

Sirius laughed and found he couldn’t stop. The ribbon of fear wound like thread upon a spindle. He laughed and laughed and so help him he thought of Remus’s laugh and the sound of it in his belly and he had to force himself to quiet for fear of weeping. The magistrate was speaking again:

He had been witnessed in the dreams of select among the townsfolk and it was common understanding that the devil could not appear in one’s image without one’s consent. Rodolphus Lestrange recalled coming down with a severe cough and partial deafness after an argument with Sirius about pigs with the Black brand loose upon his land in the late Autumn of 1689. The afflicted girls claimed torture at the sight of him and with renewed vigor when he met their eyes. Others had seen him come to being from a dog’s body in the haunted far forest and they testified that he had not been alone upon that occasion and in his company had been another who had turned from beast to man and that for a while they had tried to devour each other and then together they had disappeared.

And the magistrate asked him to all this how did he respond? Sirius told the courtroom he had not and would never hurt any of the girls of Salem or any village and if Rodolphus had sickened after their conversation nearly three years previous it had been pure coincidence. But he could not deny the last accusation because the memory of it had sustained him in his imprisonment and hunger and he did not regret it and he did not want to.

“Will you tell us the identity of this creature?”

“Not a creature,” said Sirius, “in fact my friend.”

“Is he a devil or a demon himself?”

“No,” he said. “Not far from. But no. I have never spoken to the devil, I keep telling you.”

“And whom do you believe to be the devil if not yourself?”

Bellatrix alone would not meet his eye. “I cannot speak his name.”

“Would it summon him here?”

“I know not. I know you do not want to meet him if it did. He would make all this horror look like child’s play or better. He has not yet begun to scratch the surface of that of which he is capable.”

Silence in the room, and the moon cut through vivid amidst the gaslight and the smoke that had risen into the high window. And the magistrate said, “Can you name others of your brethren?”

He listed them as the jailers bound his hands again behind his back and shoved him stumbling over his own feet out into the night as the crowd erupted in jeers and accusations and fevered prayers and the girls screamed and writhed and bit their skin and pulled their hair – “Bellatrix Lestrange – Rodolphus Lestrange – Lucius Malfoy and his wife Narcissa – Theodore Nott and his daughter Rebecca – Walden MacNair – ” And he called their names over and over into the night until his voice gave out but by then the law reporter had stopped writing.

 --

FUGUE II (HUNGER)

The date of his hanging was given for 10 June 1692. Away across the common the citizens were beginning construction on a gallows amongst the fungal wheat stalks in a far field upon the edge of the forest.

No more food was brought him as he awaited and water only upon occasion and it bitter and hardly sustenance against the vivid and textured heat. He lay upon the stone floor and thought of nothing, or of Remus upon occasion, or of death. Sometimes he remembered he could have become a dog if he dared. But he did not dare, and he doubted he could muster the strength.

He remembered occasionally that beyond the frontier Remus awaited him somewhere in the darkness if he himself had not yet been swallowed up. In the tangle of trees if he lived still he was waiting somewhere the river channeled in rapids then evened out fine as silk and wound into the forest. The sun and the moon shifted in the window and Sirius would close his eyes and open them and find the day had ended without his knowledge.

The moon turned full again and he recalled – he could no longer grasp the memory inside his own mind. He felt there was somewhere he rather ought to be and that there he was needed and that there he was not alone, in spirit or soul, or in power, or in monstrosity.

Sometimes he remembered, he had been sitting on the edge of the bed while Remus slept, and there was a pinch still in Remus’s brow from hurting, from the bones sharpening and shifting, from the skin turning inside out, from the anxious mutilation of his own hands. And there was a blush high upon his cheekbones, a soft red blood glow, from their lying together in the white dead dawn. And looking at him Sirius had felt screaming or singing in all his blood and grist and vibrating even upon the surface of his very bone the full ravishing orchestral hallelujah of some feeling he could not name. And if he thought on it hard enough even there upon the stone floor he could taste an ambrosia wedge of it – a single bright splitting note through the white noise perpetually humming in his ear. Then it would slip away again, subsumed beneath the hunger.

 --

DEATH

He was brought to the gallows on the early afternoon of June 10 in a horsecart with Dorcas Meadowes and Bridget Bishop. It was a broad blue-sky day and the sea wind coming inexorable salt from the East and shifting in the far forest. A makeshift gallows had been erected in a field gone fallow near the edge of the settlement and already the townspeople had begun to gather, including a gaggle of afflicted girls shepherded by the doctor and the minister. The village prison had become overcrowded upon their testimony necessitating the advent, finally, of the promised hangings.

Each of them was helped to stand beside his or her noose by a sheriff’s deputy. Sirius heard the trembling timbre of the women’s voices as they offered their final appeals but he was looking into the spreading green line of the forest swimming in his vision and the hills beyond rolling into the West and the low haze building there and he thought, perhaps it was not so very far from here that – but the thought disappeared as sinuously as it had come.

He did not think he feared death. He did not have the energy for fear. He heard the minister close at hand ask him to recite the Lord’s Prayer and he mustered a weak laugh. Someone sobbed from the audience. Our father who art – on earth as it is in heaven. Bring us this day our daily bread. If he had recited it rote it would not have mattered and this he understood. They had already seen the devil speaking in his ear. What could be said? Was this not hell already, if there was one? At least it must have been some purgatorial bardo. How could death be worse? He had tasted what he wanted for a moment and now it was gone. They had scraped it out of his inside along with his guts and his magic. He suspected when the carrion birds pulled him open they would see he was hollow inside but for the bones.

He felt the rope; it was rough, heavy with saltwater, fraying with age. When it began to happen there was a momentary shock of pain and then something otherwise, itself familiar from some prior world. Burnt ozone following lightning – wet woodsmoke and rain. Tannin metallic like a shiver low-in-the-spine water pulled up from a forest well and drunk from cupped hands. Winter-blue moon, blood – blood redder than anything but blood – and the still white dawn –

Upon the hearth a fire in coals. A voice –

His wand against his wrist inside his sleeve. Long ago he could put the dog on like a glove. His blood, magic – all of it singing – redder than anything, and the still white dawn –

Upon the hearth a fire in coals – a voice –

He dreamt. He did not know if it was death or true.

 --

THE DREAM

In the dream he lay again in the bed in the cabin West of everything and from the banked fire the charcoal embers imprinted red upon the swimming semidarkness. And the glow they cast in the room was orange-golden, warm as autumn, windless and still. Outside the window was summer night in fullest flush, wild coyote calls, haunted whispers of night birds, an edge of moon bright amidst the trees. A moment caught like an insect in amber. He lay back upon a supporting chest and arms wrapped him, slender and strong, clammy palms pressed up against his heartbeat, tight with fear, and he could feel under himself the breath, rapid in panic and exhaustion, the vivid staggered march of the heartbeat skipping. And the voice in his ear – hoarse and soft. Like the whispers from the forest rising on the temperate wind. “I have you,” Remus said, “I have you, Sirius, I have you, I do.”

 --

FINALE

After the first hangings in the summer field the bodies of the witches were cut down and carted to a grave dug on the edge of the forest. Not yet fully stiff they were piled into the great spreading scar of earth by the doctor and his assistants and as dusk came the townsfolk retreated to their homes or to church for renewed worship.

When it became fully dark the bereaved went again to the open grave cloaked against suspicion and they fetched the corpses of their loved ones to be buried on family land with the other folk of their blood who had dared die in the New World and it continued like this for another year or so until whatever devil had come to live in them had run its course entire. Still there were some bodies for whom no one ever came and they rotted there nameless in the potter’s field when the first grave was filled in at the end of that summer against the stench and another hole was dug.

At the black moonless midnight following the first hanging the Bishops came for their sister, and the Meadowes for their daughter, and the young man who came for the final body no one had seen before, and no one saw again. He was tall and very thin and his hair wild and his clothes ragged and unlike the others he wore no cloak and he looked more like something of the devil’s than any of the bodies in the pit. But he helped them lift their dead from the earth and lay them out gently as though they were only asleep upon the sledges drawn by their stamping skittish ponies. They had both been lovely women and were no longer. They would be carted home for a silent moonlit funeral no minister would officiate and they would rot and years later one of the frightened and manipulated children who had accused them would weep in apology in Salem parish and by God and man alike she would be forgiven.

George Bishop pushed the final body by the boots as the strange man lifted it from the grave by the shoulders. He did not say how it belonged to him – friend, brother, cousin? – and later they would wonder if he was not in fact a devil coming to retrieve his fallen. But he thanked them for their help and offered his most sincere condolences and warmly he clasped their hands. Then he took up his dead over his shoulder and carried it into the woods and the spreading shifting darkness.

For very many nights that summer there were neither stars nor moon. And in the full blinding dark there was neither motion nor color. After all was said and done the blackness would keep for a while longer. And if it ever left who could say? By then they had moved the frontier.

**Author's Note:**

> this is a bit of a swan song as an estranged native daughter of western massachusetts.  
> there are a few references in here to yeats' "the second coming." i also am obligated to mention that sleater-kinney used this title far more adeptly than me as the name of a record they released in 2005. otherwise this story was inspired by [a new yorker article](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-witches-of-salem) excerpted from stacy schiff's "the witches" and [this](http://rs-games.dreamwidth.org/93657.html) RS games story from a few years ago.  
> i have tried to keep everything as accurately historical as possible. "how oft have you eat and drunk your own damnation" is something that was really said at a witch trial in early june 1692. but as always please feel free to call me out / correct me on anything i've gotten wrong. i'm [here](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.


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